Food & Drink
The flavours of Sri Lanka
Sri Lankan food is one of Asia's great undiscovered cuisines — bold, fragrant, deeply spiced, and extraordinarily varied. From the humble rice and curry eaten three times a day to the crispy street-food pleasure of kottu roti at midnight, eating your way across the island is one of its greatest pleasures.
Cooking Classes
Learn to cook rice and curry, hoppers and pol sambol from scratch — an immersive way to understand the culture through its food.
Tea Plantation Tours
Drink a perfect cup of Ceylon tea at the source — fresh-picked and processed in a highland factory, high above the misty valleys of Nuwara Eliya.
Sri Lanka Food Guide
A complete guide to what to eat, where to eat, how to order, and the essential dishes you must try before leaving the island.
Essential Sri Lankan Dishes
Rice and curry is the foundation of Sri Lankan eating — a mound of rice surrounded by multiple small curries (dhal, jackfruit, fish or chicken, a green vegetable, papadum) plus sambol (raw coconut and chilli relish). Eaten at every meal, it never gets old. Hoppers (appa) are bowl-shaped fermented rice-flour pancakes, crispy at the edges and soft in the centre — the egg hopper, with a whole egg cracked in the middle, is a breakfast classic. String hoppers (idiyappam) are steamed rice-flour noodle nests, eaten with coconut milk curry or dhal. Kottu roti is the great Sri Lankan street food — shredded roti chopped and stir-fried on a hot griddle with vegetables, egg and meat, the rhythmic metallic clanging of the kottu blades a sound that defines Sri Lankan nights.
Drinking in Sri Lanka
Ceylon tea is the national drink — drunk sweet and milky in every home and "hotel" (local canteen). The best teas come from the high-grown estates around Nuwara Eliya. King coconut (thambili) is the bright orange roadside coconut, hacked open with a machete and drunk through the hole — naturally sweet, isotonic, and one of the island's great roadside pleasures. Coconut arrack is Sri Lanka's national spirit — distilled from coconut flower toddy, it has a distinctive dry, slightly funky character. Drink it with ginger beer as a "Lion lager and arrack" or straight over ice. Lion Lager is the ubiquitous Sri Lankan beer — a perfectly drinkable lager that goes with everything.